This petition was created to urge the Massachusetts Department of Early Education & Care to revise their requirements for reopening child care and daycare centers. We want to allow providers to open up on their own terms. By reducing enrollment, requiring more staff and space per child, and by increasing costs for multiple supplies needed, you will cripple private pay businesses. Along with these strict guidelines that will be next to impossible to follow properly, you are forcing teachers to do anything but teach. Providers will spend their day keeping our little ones and each other "apart", making children play alone - if you want to call it that, cleaning continuously, and instilling fear and anxiety in our children that they will become very ill if we don't "follow the rules". Parents will not be welcomed with open arms into classrooms, but forcibly kept out. Field trips, visitors, and enrichment that teach children about the world around them will not be allowed. Hugging, sharing, high fives, and hand holding will be discouraged if not forbidden. Everyone will have their emotions masked, literally. No soft toys, so no cuddling. No playing or sharing of toys or items. No group games or activities (even outdoors), so therefore no teamwork, skill building work, or collaborative thought. Disinfecting and sanitizing everything multiple times, all day long, so no good germs to build immune systems. No mixing of classes/groups - God forbid there is an emergency, or someone needs a break. Why would a toddler teacher need a break? Questionnaires daily to each and every family as to what they have done or who they have been around - so we are invading in each family’s privacy. Adequate staffing (but they can’t move throughout groups), should someone show a symptom, which by the way includes coughing, causing massive disruption to the day, families work schedules, and their children's lives. Quarantining even if testing comes back negative? The list goes on and on. If anyone involved in making these regulations has worked with small children, you know damn well none of this is feasible. With few daycare options before the pandemic, what is going to happen to current families who are told their children no longer have a spot? People can’t work without childcare. Preschool and childcare classrooms are supposed to be a place where you feel your child is loved, learning, and safe and is an extension of your own home. This is not that. The state of MA has failed our Early Childhood programs.